Super Mario 3D World video games console * New Best Review super mario games

The very best theory I've heard about the mysterious way that Mario games get made runs similar to this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, there are people working on Mario stuff constantly, regardless of specific games. They're just toiling away in the Mario mines, churning out endless ideas for anything and everything - bosses, collectables, enemies, traversal gimmicks, ghost house hallways, the works. Mario is definitely being made, and practically any idea can lie within its remit. Mario is games, and all games - all toys, all play - can eventually be folded in to the mix.

That certainly explains a game title like Super Mario 3D World - just one more Mario title where each new level may be trusted to throw in a one-off idea that's forgotten seconds later. 3D World has a story, but as ever, it drifts in to the ether the moment you take your first jump. It has world themes - desert, ice, grasslands - but they're largely ignored as you hop between pools of bizarre brilliance that defy easy categorisation. Autumn, water parks, the circus: each level takes you somewhere different, while every minute of play spools outwards in an agreeable 60fps jumble of nutty concepts - perhaps nuttier here than ever before. And yet! And yet that famous Mario coherency still rules - because whatever you encounter in a Mario game reminds you of another thing you encountered in another Mario game. Because Mario is games.

Exhibit A: We need to share with you the goomba shoe. You realize, the goomba shoe from Super Mario Bros. 3, a single-shot power-up that appears only in level 5-3, where you discover a goomba stomping around in a big green boot - a boot you can steal.

Hardly anybody remembers the goomba shoe, but, behind the scenes, Mario's custodians were playing the long game. Nintendo was just biding its time, twiddling its thumbs, looking forward to an ideal moment to remind everyone about this weirdo footwear. And the right moment - not in the odd cameo in the RPG spin-offs - is level 3-1 of Mario 3D World: a snowy playground in that you move through pine forests and over deep drifts before venturing onto a frozen lake where a goomba awaits, turning dreamy circles in an ice skate. An ice skate you are able to steal.

The ice skate's a one-hit deal, but it's great as you have it.

There are a handful of explanations why that is noteworthy. Firstly, it turns out that a goomba in an ice skate - serious, self-contained, frowning with lofty pride like all too conscious of the vital role he plays in Bowser's master plan - is obviously the single funniest thing you will dsicover this year. Secondly, the goomba ice skate is a classy reminder that even whenever a Mario game looks a little underwhelming in some recoverable format, even when some have suggested it seems somewhat phoned-in, well, even then it's still better to reserve judgment.

Like Super Mario 3D Land, then, 3D World is definitely an endless freewheeling treat of a game title, and it starts in what is like one of the greatest Mario power-ups of most time. Cat Mario is really a near-perfect mixture of all Nintendo's skills: its animations reveal attention to detail condensed by a wonderfully childlike degree of abstraction, its lock-on swipe attack solves the issue of close-up combat in complex 3D spaces, and that skittering, claws-out scrabble allows you to scale the steep walls that would otherwise have hemmed you into these compact level maps. Like Yoshi or the cape in the first Mario World, Cat Mario makes you're feeling powerful. You can do astonishing things whenever you wield that fluffy uniform, but you're vulnerable too, and you'll wince with fury whenever you lose your new toys fumbling over a silly risk.

Cat Mario's the stand-out, however the double cherry, another 3D World debut, could be the craziest power-up ever. Double cherry chucks in another Mario everytime you eat one, each fresh addition moving in sync as you race across a map. You can chain double cherries until you're wielding only a little Mario dance troupe, and you can split them up and fan them out by bumping them, tactically, in to the environment. Everything you may hope for Nintendo to do with this concept is well and truly covered. Control four of them and you will discover they produce a strangely socialist image: a quartet of punchy little comrades bobbing along in braces.

The art direction's still brilliant, and multiplayer's enlivened by a little gentle rivalry as you fight for the crown that goes to the victor of every level.

The cat and the cherries mingle nicely alongside old friends just like the tanooki and the fire flower, the boomerang and a scattering of new weirdo asides which can be too good to spoil in advance. They're all slotted into a game that provides some sort of antic, hyperactive cheekiness - from an even that hides its first collectable behind the kick off point to others that drop you into the middle of the action with only 100 seconds on the clock.

With shortish stages - for the absolute most part - and plenty of'em, 3D World is just a creative blur. This is a game that's looked at as much ways for you yourself to scale that end-of-level flagpole because it has levels that end. Halfway through the complete adventure, you'll suddenly realise that, in the midst with this chaos, somebody's quietly altered the way in which Mario accelerates, offering a kind of two-speed gear change with a burst of nitro in the middle.

It's typical of Mario's designers, really. Pick a level at random, and you get astonishing blink-and-you'll-miss-it invention. One stage I've just chosen pretty much blind offers a power-up that turned my head into a cannon, a view of some goombas relaxing in rubber rings, and a frog that expels huge gobs of coins when stepped on. Moving outwards, the chunky snooker-felt-and-hard-plastic overworld maps that bring these levels together are full of lovely details that go beyond mere hidden trinkets to search out. Listen hard in World 2 and you'll hear cats singing combined with whistling sands. In World 3, the feet ring out a musical tinkling effect as you shift from running on snow to racing down frozen train tracks.

It's beautiful in addition to busy, too. While Nintendo came to HD textures late, it's benefited significantly more than most - probably because it's rendering interests that go beyond rust and gunmetal. Mario's world has long been scattershot in its materials, but 3D World really revels in sending you from an assault course built of quilting to a different made from cake batter. It's gorgeous stuff.

Even Cat Mario's walking animation is ideal - body bouncing gently, head embracing left and right - a cat out and about with nowhere it needs to be.

Other nods to the particular strengths of the Wii U - whatever they may turn out to be - are relatively few. There are certainly a handful of levels where you have to prod the GamePad screen to smash crates and raise or lower platforms (or move them about by blowing), and there's off-screen play and Miiverse integration. You are able to share ghost Mii runthroughs, Trackmania-style, and you may also draw on the screen to highlight things for other players (or to annoy them).

By and large, though, you will have just as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more pleasurable, in reality, as multiplayer is yet again nestled right near one's heart of the entire experience, letting you pick involving the line-up from Super Mario Bros. 2 (Peach still has that hover move, although this has been reined in a little) and turn each level right into a ceaseless, primary-colour barroom brawl where life expectancies are measured in seconds as opposed to minutes. The implementation's as straightforward as you could hope for: it's essentially the multiplayer systems of New Super Mario Bros. Wii brought into three dimensions. The game camera struggles a bit when it's really hectic and you're all headed in various directions, nonetheless it doesn't matter as much as it will due to a selection of levels that provide large, open spaces at the start or end. Multiplayer Mario's about hilarious disasters significantly more than precision team-work, anyway. It's in regards to the plummet as much as the jump.

If there's an overarching theme to a game title as nutty as 3D World, though, I suspect, like Mario 3D Land, it's to do with variation. Mario's glorious 3DS outing would interrupt the conventional flow of programming every now and then to tilt the camera down and saddle the plumber with the mechanics of Zelda, say, and there's a similar impulse at work here. This still isn't a grand reinvention in the style of Galaxy. Instead, there is a more ad-libbed drive to observe how stretchy Mario may be, and to explore how a variety of situations he is able to be squashed into without changing the basic rhythm of play. There's a level that employs stealth mechanics, as an example, and another where you're cast, from time to time, as a Mario shadow-puppet. You can find rhythm action sequences, lock-and-key tasks, and Captain Toad levels where you can't jump at all.

Stealth! No jumping! Mario, inevitably, copes with everything thrown at him, while each stage still manages to stuff in the requisite collectables - in this instance, three green stars to simply help open up progress gates, and cute little icon-printing stamps you should use in Miiverse posts. Meanwhile, the soundtrack is arguably the series'greatest yet - and that's including Super Mario Galaxy 2. It's as lavish and quick-changing as the agenda: Ealing Comedy one minute, risqué 70s gameshow the next. The mournful, yawning strings of a ghost house feel such as a true series highlight - that is pastiche at its most skilful, its most panoramic.

Compact by the standards of the Galaxy adventures but still full of bountiful secrets, beneath the warm familiarity of 3D World lies among the strangest Mario games in years - or at least one of the most random in its influences and its moment-to-moment indulgences. And that's a very, excellent thing. The Wii U sees Nintendo's mascot racing into venerable middle age by going wonderfully loopy - by dialling up the energy, even when the end result is often absolutely insane. After all these years, who could blame him?